Improving Grid Power Availability in Rural Telecom Exchanges

Abstract

India has seen a huge surge in the telecom sector with total rural telecom subscribers doubling from 200.81 million to 404.16 million between 2010 and 2015. Therefore, telecom exchanges are built throughout the country to support this development. With severe electric power shortages in rural India, it poses a challenge to power these exchanges. It is observed that power supply in rural areas is not always available in three phase and can sometimes be available in two or single phase depending on fault in the three-phase system. Currently, used power plants in telecom exchanges are not designed to adapt to these variable input phase conditions. In this paper, a method is proposed to modify the currently used power plants such that they easily adapt to variable input phase conditions. This will lead to the utmost utilization of grid power and save valuable diesel fuel used in back-up diesel generators. The proposed method is designed and verified to have reasonable input power quality as per international standards. A quantitative estimation of diesel savings is also presented to estimate the percentage of diesel savings as a function of power outage.